In Don t Stop Me If You ve Heard This Before Peter Turchi combines personal narrative and close reading of a wide range of stories and novels to reveal how writers create the fiction that matters to us Building on his much loved Maps of the Imagination The Writer as Cartographer Turchi leads readers and writers to an understanding of how the intricate mechanics of storytelling including shifts in characters authority the subtle manipulation of images careful attention to point of view the strategic release of information and even digressing from the apparent story can create powerful effects Using examples from Dickens Chekhov and Salinger and Twain to more contemporary writers including Toni Morrison Alice Munro E L Doctorow Jenny Erpenbeck Adam Johnson Mohsin Hamid Jai Chakrabarti Yoko Ogawa Richard Powers Deborah Eisenberg Olga Tokarczuk Rachel Cusk and Colson Whitehead Turchi offers illuminating insights